As rest of U.S. sizzles, Seattle residents shiver

SEATTLE -- As the rest of the country bakes in summer heat, Seattle residents have been bundled up, dealing with temperatures that can't seem to break out of the 60s.

Even in a place used to rain, the gloominess is getting on people's nerves.

There are different ways to measure the frustration. A weatherman counted the minutes -- yes, minutes -- that the temperature has hit 80 degrees or higher. (He says 78 minutes, by the way.)

And annoyance has been spilling out roughly 140 characters at a time. "Seriously Seattle! Can we have any kind of a summer? Ahh C'mon," one Twitter user said.

Another tweet: "MISSING: Hot, sunny summer. IF FOUND please return to Seattle as soon as possible. REWARD offered."

It's been a month since the summer solstice and there have been only three days with temperatures above 80 at Sea-Tac International airport's measuring station. The coldest day had a low of 62. To make matters worse, rain has dampened more than a few weekends.

But statistics might be telling another story.

Jay Neher, meteorologist at the National Weather Service, said Wednesday that on average, "July has [been] only one degree below normal."

And Neher isn't complaining.

"It all depends what you think is cool. If you consider below 80 cool, then it has been cool. I did notice that we had only three days below 70 in July. That doesn't sound too bad for me."

But for KOMO News forecaster Scott Sistek, high temperatures aren't telling the whole story. In a blog post that spread around Seattle this week, Sistek said ttemperatures have been dropping fast.

He writes that on July 2, for example, the high temperature hit 81 degrees during the day but dropped to 64 by 9 p.m.

He says that day was only at 80 degrees or higher for 12 minutes that day.

Sistek says he went over minute-by-minute temperature reports from the University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences Department, which measures temperatures at the school's Seattle campus, north of Sea-Tac International Airport, and found that there was just one other day where temperatures hit 80 degrees or above -- July 6, for 66 minutes.

The total isn't even as long as an average summer movie. And Sistek says there were nearly 19 hours of temperatures at 75 degrees or cooler.

"The Pacific Coast has been the only safe haven for excruciating heat, so maybe staying cool isn't such a horrible thing," he wrote on his blog. "But we realize that there are a lot of sun fans out here who realize hot weather is rare enough in a normal summer, much less this one. So next time the temperature climbs to 80 degrees, run -- don't walk -- to your nearest beach. It might be all you get."

Besides collective complaining, the dreary summer so far has had a real impact on some -- especially those who depend on the sun to make a living.

Devin Carroll, manager of Urban Surf, said that sales of "clothing, sunglasses and swimsuits have definitely been affected a lot."

Carroll added, "So far, we haven't seen much of summer."

At a boat rental shop on Green Lake, only four or five boats are on the water when it's cloudy, manager Nicole Birgh said.

"On sunny days, almost all of our boats would be out on the water," she added. Birgh shop has 37 paddleboats total, along with another 40 vessels, ranging from kayaks to paddlebikes.

Cliff Mass, a Washington professor of atmospheric sciences, said the cloud patterns are the opposite of July's usual pattern.

Instead of wet and cool at the beginning of the month, those days came in the middle of the month. Mass said the last week of July and the beginning of August are typically the driest weeks of the year.

What has irked people, Mass said, is that the state had one of wettest and coldest springs in years, and people expect the sunshine by now.

The forecast calls for a drier weekend, then back to clouds, Mass said. He said there're signs the cloud trough in the eastern Pacific that has been causing all the problems is weakening.

"I'm pretty optimistic," he said. "I think probably we've been through the worst."